Principal Investigator
Eva Wittenberg
I am interested in how the mind assembles meaning, how this capacity came to be, and how it interacts with other cognitive abilities. My research examines the structural choices speakers make when they package messages in grammar, and how listeners rapidly process those choices, infer why something was said in a particular way, and construct a representation of the speaker’s intended meaning. I direct the Language Comprehension Lab at CEU. View my short academic CV.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Anna Alexandra Kamenetski
My research focuses on language and event cognition—especially how grammar affects how speakers of different languages perceive, describe, and process events. I use methods including EEG and eye-tracking. I joined CEU as a postdoctoral researcher on Project LISA in January 2025, where I investigate the neural correlates of social event processing.
Elena Marx
My research focuses on the interface between event perception and language, particularly how people perceive, linguistically encode, and mentally represent temporal relations between events. I also study the developmental foundations of event cognition. I completed my PhD in Cognitive Science at CEU in 2026 and am continuing at CEU as a postdoctoral researcher.
Naomi Nota
My research examines how people efficiently process language and how this is shaped by cognitive demands. I focus on factors that support comprehension, such as prediction, as well as situated language use, including social context and multimodal cues. I have studied different populations (children, younger adults, and older adults with and without hearing impairment) using a range of methods, including corpora, behavioural experiments with virtual avatars, and eye-tracking. I started my postdoctoral position at CEU (LISA project) in June 2026, where I study how social event construal influences episodic memory. View my personal website.
PhD Researchers
Oliwia Iwan
My background is in general and comparative linguistics and philosophy. For my MA at the University of Vienna, I investigated temporal structures in Polish relative clauses with past-under-past tense. My doctoral research examines how phrase structure, adjective semantics, and interlocutors’ subtle pragmatic cues shape the mapping of linguistic attributes onto perceptual representations. I began my PhD at CEU in fall 2023.
Xueyi Yao (Icey) - currently on leave
I am interested in event perception, event memory, and language. My PhD research explores how language reconstructs memories of events. I joined the CEU PhD program in fall 2023 and am currently on leave.
Visiting PhD Student
Tiziana Srdoč
I am a PhD student in Cognitive Science at the University of Vienna. I study the developmental and evolutionary origins of language and its interplay with cognition. As a visiting researcher with the LCL, I contribute to Project LISA, investigating how language influences social-action comprehension. I have collaborated with the lab since March 2024.
Student Interns
Mohamed Ali Riahi
I am an MEi:CogSci master’s student at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and a research intern at the LCL since the Fall of 2025. I hold a BA in Psychology and am interested in cognition and the mechanisms that underlie how people process and represent information. My current research focuses on how linguistic cues, including aspect and event structure, influence temporal construal during language comprehension.
Tobias Spenger
I am an Undergrad Philosophy student at the University of Vienna currently working as an intern on the LISA project, helping with EEG data collection, data pre-processing and tasks related to preparation and execution of the study. I started in the beginning of May 2026. My interests lie in social cognition and the understanding of self as an inextricably socially embedded phenomenon. I am especially interested in the limits and tensions of concepts of the self with concepts of the social.
Staff
Attila Balla
I am a psychologist, political scientist, and CEU alumnus. My research interests include political psychology, political communication, and voting behavior. I am a PhD student in the Social Psychology program at Masaryk University and a member of the Brno Lab of Intergroup Processes at the Czech Academy of Sciences. I have served as the Language Comprehension Lab manager since June 2022.
Prisca Tretter
I am a scientist with master’s degrees in Cognition, Behavior and Neuroscience from the University of Vienna and Zoology from the University of Innsbruck. My research interests include the neural mechanisms of language processing, cognitive development, and comparative perspectives on human and animal behavior. I use neurocognitive methods, including EEG, and have worked as a research assistant at the Language Comprehension Lab since November 2025.
Affiliated Researchers
Natalia Jardón
My research examines events in language and cognition, with a particular focus on whether linguistically established distinctions such as stativity and change are available beyond language. I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Language Comprehension Lab from 2023 to 2025 and am now based in the Department of Catalan Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I continue to collaborate with LCL researchers.
See our former lab members.